The Sea Break

by Antony Trew

  She greeted him with bright eyes. “Hallo, sweetie! What are you doing here?”

  Frowning, he took her aside where they could not be overheard. “It’s about to-night’s party,” he said.

  “What’s wrong? Is it off?”

  He shook his head, his dark eyes grim. “No. But it might be a funny sort of party.”

  “Not indecent, I hope, Günther?” She said it so cheerfully, he wondered if she wished it might be.

  “No! No! But first I must swear you to secrecy. You must not tell Mariotta or Cleo.” He hesitated and then dropped his voice. “It might damage the Third Reich.”

  She noted the air of portentous gloom and realised that he had something important to tell her, so she said: “Of course I’ll treat it as secret. But why are you telling me?”

  “Because I don’t want you to get hurt.” Moewe felt a tickle of gallantry as he said that and saw her eyes soften.

  “Tell me all about it.” She patted her hair and fiddled with her frock in the irrelevant way women do in moments of crisis. She was an attractive girl: tall with regular features and smiling eyes.

  Guardedly, Moewe told her all he knew and when he finished she clapped her hands, looking quite entranced. “But how thrilling. British naval officers in disguise. Spies. Guns!” She became serious. “But Cleo and Mariotta will be terribly upset. I’ve not met these boys, David and Johan, but they are always talking about them. They say they are marvellous. The one is a German, the other an Afrikaner. Are you sure you’re right?”

  “Absolutely,” said Moewe, adding darkly, “We have our sources of information.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing, Hester. Keep your eyes and ears open and if trouble starts in the cabin—the Captain says it’s most unlikely—fall down flat on the floor. That’s the safest place in a fight.”

  “Ooh! Sounds terrible.” Hester’s eyes shone.

  “Anyway, liebling, I’ll be there to protect you.”

  Rather tactlessly, she said: “Will Heinrich Schäffer be there. He’s so strong.”

  “And stupid,” said Moewe ungraciously.” Beware of him, Hester. He’s a womaniser. Even native women, they say.”

  “But of course, darling. I wasn’t thinking of that! It’s just that he’s so big and strong.”

  Irritated that Schäffer had been brought into the conversation, Günther Moewe got ready to go. “The launch will be waiting for you in the fishing harbour at eight-thirty. Cleo and Mariotta will be there with their friends, and Di Brett and her friend.”

  “Who is Di, Günther?”

  Only that morning Kapitän Lindemann had told him who she was, but this was not information he could pass on to Hester. “She is an Englishwoman who lives at the Polana,” he said briefly.

  Had some omniscient being that Wednesday been able to see into the minds of those connected in one way or another with “Operation Break Out,” what a strange miscellany of thought he would have observed: for example, Otto Stauch working in his office off the Rua Araújo, hot and perspiring as usual, wondering what the night would yield, inevitably his thoughts wandering into his particular dream world: the Berghof at Berchtesgaden, the great room he had never seen, its wall of windows overlooking the valley, rich with the art treasures the Führer had pilfered as his legions drove across Europe. The Führer himself standing in God-like solitude looking out over the Bavarian mountains to the Tyrol, then turning, his mesmeric eyes burning into Stauch, the outstretched hand, the rare but engaging smile, and the magic voice: “Ah, Herr Stauch. I congratulate you in the name of the Third Reich for your services to Germany …”

  On board the Hagenfels Lindemann was sitting at the desk in his day-cabin, writing a letter to his wife. At times he would stop, his thoughts far away with her and the children, then he would write again.

  When he’d finished the letter he began to worry about the night ahead. He was a man of peace and he felt uneasy. The sea, not war, was his love. His thoughts went back to the early days when he had trained in sail: once again he was out on the foretop yard, his bare feet gripping the foot rope, one frozen hand clawing at the flapping foretopsail, the other holding on for dear life. The wind screaming and tearing at his body so that he was involved in a personal struggle with the gale—beyond these things he was conscious of nothing but the dark pit of the night. Each time he grasped the wet canvas it was whipped from his hand and he knew that soon he would lack the strength to go back along the yard and down the rigging …

  A deck above Kapitän Lindemann, second officer Günther Moewe was in the chartroom looking at the chart of Lourenço Marques. The signal from the Wilhelmstrasse would come at any moment now and he wished to be in all respects ready: to know by heart the configuration of the bay with its many shoals, the courses they would have to steer, the depths of water they would encounter, the lights they would see, the tides and currents. Nothing must be left to chance. As he rolled the parallel rulers from the compass rose to the chosen points, drawing the pencilled course lines with neat, firm strokes, his thoughts turned to the coming night. He burned with inward fire at the impertinence of these British swine, coming on board a German ship under the pretext of friendship. Disguised. Ready to spy. To cheat! Enemies of the Third Reich! The British were being taught a sharp lesson by Hitler. They had discovered what the armed might of the new Germany meant. They were under no illusion now as to the courage and tenacity of German troops. The British were an effete anachronism; a once great people who had grown soft and lost their way. The mantle of imperial glory had fallen upon the Aryan master race. Moewe dropped the pencil on to the chart and rested his head in his hands, his thoughts soaring until he saw once again the camp-fires of the Hitler Jugend in the Black Forest, the marching songs, the fair-haired Brunhildes waiting for their Siegfrieds—a little irreverently he remembered the night he’d seduced his Brunhilde in a haystack. It was the first time for her—she was fifteen—and afterwards she had cried and he’d felt embarrassed at first and then annoyed that the prospect of bearing a warrior in arms for the Third Reich could evoke any emotion other than pride. He tried to remember her name …

  Siegfried Kuhn, the chief engineer, was in his cabin one deck below, entering the fuel and water registers. His thoughts were uncomplicated, for as always they were about his engines. To be precise, the need to renew the glands of the main fresh-water feed pump. It would be a two-day job; with the ship at twenty-four hours’ notice it could not be tackled. In any case it was not urgent. A matter of routine maintenance. The pump would lose a little of its efficiency but that was not serious.

  Heinrich Schäffer, the second engineer, was down in the engine-room writing up the log-book, but his thoughts were not on what he was doing; they were as usual confused. One part of his mind considered the strange situation which required him to come back on board at ten o’clock that night with the Freiherr, armed and ready for trouble, but under strict orders not to start anything.

  Schäffer liked a fight. He’d been in many. For three Britishers he didn’t need a gun. His fists would be enough. The other part of his mind toyed with its perennial thought—it concerned women, and there is little point in pursuing it….

  Ashore, Freiherr Ernst Joachim Sigismund von Falkenhausen was in his study resting, his mind much on coming events and what they might bring. Somehow or other he must neutralise Widmark and his men. How, he was not clear. Violence on board with the women present was out of the question. Ashore, discreetly handled, it was always a possibility. But not for all of them. They couldn’t all be dealt with that way. Widmark, yes, and perhaps McFadden, or the man Newton. But Widmark and McFadden were not coming to the party. Still, there might be other opportunities, though not much time was left. The cool rational part of the Freiherr’s mind told him, however, that violence was not really the solution. The answer was to so mislead these people that they would be put off the scent, so that when they woke up to what was happening the Hagenfels would alre
ady have gone. The Freiherr sighed; he longed to get to sea again, to have done with espionage. While he had been risking his freedom and his life to gather information, brother naval officers had been gathering Iron Crosses, oak leaves and swords; not only that, they had had all the thrills and solid achievements—the hardships, too, he had to admit—of the war at sea. Spying was an anxious uncertain business. There was no recognition, no protection. The grandfather clock struck and he was reminded of the family schloss outside Schneidemühl. He thought of his mother and father and of his sisters; of his favourite rides; of his falcons and the hundreds of hours he had spent training them, and the thrill of hunting them. Of them all, Atilla was his favourite. Wicked, fiendish Atilla, straining at his jesses, talons clawing at the gloved fist, upside down, bating, aquiver with rage. Then he saw Gina, his Italian wife, and thinking of her pale beauty he felt alone and sad. Gina was dead. What was the use of thinking about her. It could only hurt. After Gina, life had been empty and aimless and women no more than passing fountains at which he had refreshed himself. Helga was one of these. Attractive? Yes. But how could she really mean anything to him after Gina?

  Ridding himself of these desolate thoughts, he went to the small table and poured himself a schnapps….

  And what were the others thinking about? Widmark’s men? Mostly of what the night might bring, but interwoven with these were other thoughts: Mike Kent, for example, in between checking the W/T call signs he would have to use—the challenges and replies, the drill when they passed Ponta Vermelha signal station—and wondering what sort of wireless set-up he’d find in the Hagenfels‚ and whether he’d know his way about it—in between these, Mike Kent was thinking about his climbs on Table Mountain and the Drakensberg; he was thinking, too, of the days spent birdwatching and some of the exciting finds—the Nerina Trogon he’d seen early one morning while walking down a fire-break in the Knysna forests and once, standing on a high slope of the Drakensberg near Himeville, he’d seen a peregrine falcon go into a stoop which ended far below him when it struck a rock pigeon in flight. Once again he saw the moment of the strike, the puff of feathers and what seemed a long time afterwards the sound of it—like a muffled handclap. In the Drakensberg, near Garden Castle, he had heard a shrill sad cry and looking for its source had seen a Lammergeier sitting on a rock. He was ten then and it had been one of the most exciting moments of his life, for this great eagle was rarely seen …

  Johan and Hans le Roux, confident in their strength and in Widmark’s leadership, were probably the least worried but they, too, suffered from that queeziness and loss of appetite which precedes action. These two were not only remarkably alike physically, but their outlook on life, their beliefs, were much the same. Both had been brought up in the Calvinist mould, so that God was often in their thoughts and like their frontiersmen forefathers they put their faith in equal measure in the Almighty and their strong right arms; the one, they were convinced, could not do without the other. As to their other thoughts that day they were largely of the farm at Zwartruggens where they had been born and reared, of their family who lived there and of the girls on adjoining farms whom they planned to marry.

  Thinking of the farm they saw not only the old stone farmhouse, Veelsgeluk‚ but the whole six thousand morgen, the ploughed lands, the mealie and teff lands, the kopjes and dry watercourses, the dusty tracks winding through the thorn bush; the stone kraals and wattle and daub huts of the Africans; the herds of beef cattle, sturdy brown Afrikaners with humped shoulders, and the rough coated black Aberdeen Angus; the tractor sheds and the corn grinders; the muddy water-pans and the windmills, and the endless veld grass—and these pictures evoked the smell of wood fires, of dung-filled cattle kraals, and of the veld after rain had fallen on parched land …

  Andrew McFadden thought mostly of the diesels he would have to start that night and keep running until the Hagenfels had reached the safety of Durban; and of the auxiliary machinery, the generators and circulating pumps and ventilation motors that would have to be kept going. But he never doubted his ability to do these things with the assistance of Hans.

  Outside these compulsive thoughts were private ones of the small house in Rondebosch where his wife and three small children lived, Jeannie no doubt worrying about where he was and what he was doing, for he had told her nothing more than that he would be gone for a few weeks. Discreet and understanding, accepting this as yet another of the unpleasant things the war required of her husband, she had kissed him good-bye and kept back her tears. Other thoughts, irrelevant but vivid, tumbled in and out of his mind: the launching of a ship on the Clyde when he was an apprentice in a shipyard; a cycling trip with Jeannie from Gourock to Largs on a glorious summer’s day in 1932 when they were engaged. Half-way there he had tussled with a faulty bicycle pedal and she had chided him: “You’re no’ an engineer’s foot, Andy, if ye let a wee thing like that get the better o’ you …”

  David Rohrbach, serious, intensely committed to the task ahead, thought much of his family in Germany, of his time at Munich University and, characteristically, of some of the great music he had heard. For some reason his thoughts dwelt on a trip up the Rhine with his mother, father and two sisters. They had boarded the steamer at Frankfurt and left it in Cologne to return by train. It had rained most of the day and now looking back, sadly, he recalled with what pride his father had recounted the history and legends of the great river, of Pfalz and the Lorelei and other famous landmarks they had seen, and how he had spoken of the glory of Germany. The Germany which was now doing God knows what to that father and those sisters—the Germany which had embarked on the most obscene orgy of murder that the world had ever known. These things hardened his heart and made him look forward to the night in a way which none of the others could, except perhaps Widmark. Revenge was something he had to reject intellectually, yet emotionally he was dominated by the Old Testament’s eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth …

  James Fellowes Newton was perhaps the member of the party whose sensibilities were least involved. He disliked the Germans because they had disturbed the peace he’d so much enjoyed, and he resented with an inward and controlled anger the bombing of London and other British cities.

  To him as an Englishman it was incomprehensible that the nation which had produced Goethe, Wagner, Bach, Mann and Einstein should have fallen for a rabble-rouser like Hitler—that it could have gone to so much trouble to be beastly to so many different people. His general view of the enemy now was that they were a bunch of misguided bounders who would have to be put in their place whatever the price.

  He looked forward to the night’s work in a casual, partly eager, partly fearful fashion. It would be the first action to come his way for a long time and he was grateful for the relief from boredom. He had enjoyed the time in Lourenço Marques: the sleuthing round the docks and the more sophisticated pleasures of Di Brett’s company. While he resolved that he would do all he could to keep her out of harm’s way on board the Hagenfels, he felt at the same time that the journey to Durban would be all the better for her company.

  Inevitably he thought a good deal about his wife Betty and his family’s home in Oporto, and for an hour he engaged in his favourite piece of escapism: planning with pencil and paper the house he hoped to build for her there after the war. That led his thoughts to the cruising ketch he’d designed while in the Dorsetshire and which, come the peace, he intended to have built in Lisbon.

  Finally there was Stephen Widmark, alone in his room at the Polana writing up his diary and, when he had finished, addressing it to himself, care of his father in Cape Town, going downstairs and asking the hall porter to dispatch it by registered post. This he did not because he envisaged failure, but because he could not exclude the possibility that something might happen to him and he knew that the diary was the sole evidence of his personal responsibility for “Operation Break Out,” and of the innocence of his companions. He wished, too, to ensure that those concerned would know—should he not be
there—by what process of reasoning he had arrived at the decision to take matters into his own hands.

  Later, back in his room, he spent some time reading Francis Thompson, ending with The Hound of Heaven which left him, as always, strangely agitated and restless. Cleo came into his thoughts then and he made vague but satisfying plans for their future. Then he embarked upon an imaginary dialogue with her but gave it up because—knowing nothing of her other than those ten minutes in Costa’s—he had no idea what she might say or think in other circumstances. Later he became depressed and his thoughts went back to the Kasos Strait, and to the gale in which his mother had drowned. Once again his mind re-enacted in all their vivid horror these events from which it was never really free, and he ended up on the bed, straining, his body taut, and his nerves jangling.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Operation Break Out” went into action at five o’clock that afternoon when Widmark and Rohrbach took their cars to garages in different parts of the town, handed them over for storing, luggage locked in the boot, charges paid in advance.